A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin.

One of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the Twenty-First Century and a classic of short fiction, Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women was a global sensation upon its publication in 2015, eleven years after its author’s death. Largely unheralded throughout her peripatetic life, Berlin was a fiction writer of staggering, singular genius. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafted miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians.

Written over the course of thirty years, the forty-three stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women—collected here in a 10th anniversary edition—are short fiction at its most unforgettable and original, told with unmistakable style by a master of the form. View Less